Self-Maintained Distributed Tuples for Field-based Coordination in Dynamic Networks

Field-based coordination is a very promising approach for a wide range of application scenarios in modern dynamic networks. To implement such an approach, one can rely on distributed tuples injected in a network and propagated to form a distributed data structure to be sensed by application agents. However, to gain the full benefits from such a coordination approach, it is important to enable the distributed tuples to preserve their structures despite the dynamics of the network. In this paper, we show how a variety of self-maintained distributed tuple structures for field-based coordination can be easily programmed in the TOTA middleware. Several examples clarify the approach, and performance data is presented to verify its effectiveness.